Pragmatic Dictator

That is the front page headline of The Sun newspaper with similar wording in The Mirror and in some of the local rags handed out around London. These headlines are of course related to the horrible business over at Virginia Tech and sadly, I believe they are making a bad situation worse.

These kinds of headlines demonize the attack and ultimately place the blame squarely on the gunman. Demonization has historically been used as a powerful tool for motivating armies to fight, just think about how a lot of people have described Iraqi forces or the Nazis. Fortunately the likes of Tim Collins have stood up and said this is not the right way and done something about it (meeting significant political resistance along the way).

So if the military have figured out that demonization is not a good tactic, why do we as a society allow this to be pushed through our newspapers and other channels? Perhaps because it allows us to blame someone else and move on? Make no mistake the incident at Virginia Tech is appalling but if we are to learn lessons we need to avoid blaming the gunman and start asking ourselves as a society some harsh questions like “why did we ignore the warning signs?”

Technorati Tags: Virginia Tech

I wrote something about parallels between distributed systems and real life which included some stuff on the bird flu’ outbreak here in the UK. Imagine my surprise when I saw this referral!

Made me smile anyways, not quite the readership I was expecting!

Is a (popular?) saying that essentially means “There’s more than one way to do something”.

And the fact that there are many ways to do things makes for a lot of fun, after all variety is the spice of life! But it also brings a burden of having to sort through the options and pick the one most appropriate.

This should all be horribly familiar to most of us but I’m going to concentrate on engineers for the rest of this blog. See, engineers do some peculiar things when confronted with this reality:

1. They invent all sorts of complex classification schemes in an attempt to determine the best solution.
2. They often ignore available real-world data or worse the fact that there is no data.
3. They declare one solution the solution for now and all time ignoring the fact that things change.
4. They attempt to force their choice of solution on everyone else – “my way is the only way and all should follow because that’s what I’ve decided is best for you”.
5. Once they’ve decided on the solution, no question or opposing view is acceptable.

If you have any of these tendencies take note:

1. You are not infallible, your solution may not be the best.
2. If someone else picked a better solution, it could cost you big time.
3. If you keep pushing your solution without listening to others, you risk making yourself an outcast.

Then take a break, go get a chill pill and mend your ways. Be a little less prescriptive and thrive on that variety.

Technorati Tags: philosophy, engineering